1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to digital media content filtration and more particularly relates to automated digital media content filtration based on relationship monitoring.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the proliferation of social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace, a typical computer user may publish and have access to massive amounts of digital media content, including images, videos, and music, on a daily basis. Friends may send media to one another in a casual setting, or professionals may send similar content in a work setting. Furthermore, in a social networking site, content may be broadcast to all members or a subset of members. Consequently, social networking websites, as with other internet technologies such as email and Instant Messenging (“IM”) programs, may lead to an individual being overloaded with information.
Sites such as MySpace and Facebook allow users to associate contacts or “friends” with user profiles to enable messages and media to be sent back and forth. Often, users have dozens if not hundreds of friends in their online social network. These friends may publish several media content items per day or per week. As a result, users are bombarded with massive quantities of media and are forced to sift through this media to find items they want.
One solution by Facebook is the “newsfeed,” which keeps a running tab of the most recent events, including media uploads, of a user's friends. Each action is given equal weight on the newsfeed. With the advent of Facebook applications, an application named “Top Friends” has been created, where a user may manually select his “top friends” so that he does not have to sift through his mass friend list to find them.
Image and video sites such as flickr and YouTube allow users to upload and tag media so that other users in the online community may view, comment, and rate the media. This allows the members of the community to make more accurate searches for media as well as determine by rating what should be at the top of the search list. However, the top rated media still may not be relevant to a user who has particular interests or tastes.
With respect to the music service industry, the Yahoo! Music service allows users to construct a custom station that is based on music enjoyed by friends on the users' Yahoo Messenger buddy list. This allows for users to be exposed to music of interest to their friends. However, the Yahoo! Music service requires users to manually rate each song.